Spotlight on...Yuzimi

Author: John Patrick Allen

Meet Middlebury College's newest performing student band - Yuzimi. With enough catchy tunes to please a drunken partygoer, enough real talent to please a musician and enough contagious energy to make an audience get up and dance, Yuzimi is ready to take a solid place in the College music scene. After the band's first performance at Liebstock 2008, The Middlebury Campus spoke with four of Yuzimi's five members - Aaron Krivitzky '09, Matt Vaughan '09, Adam Levine '09 and Dan Neslusan '09 - about the group's identity, style and goals.

The Campus: How did Yuzimi form?
Aaron Krivitzky: That's a complicated question.
Matt Vaughan: All of us have played in different bands before. Aaron and I had the idea for this type of band for about a year. Finally everyone joined, but we needed a singer. I had seen Elizabeth [Goffe '10] in Certified Organic Musical. She had also worked with Aaron, Adam and Dan before, so we just asked her to try something new. She was more than enthusiastic. Since then we've all been having a good time. We're all very dedicated.
Adam Levine: We've all played together before in different contexts, and this is a sort of culmination of all that.

TC: What do you mean by "this type of band?"
MV: A rockin' party band that plays funky songs and makes people want to dance. We want to make music that resonates with people but is also really interesting to play and challenging.
AK: I've played in party bands before and it was less than enthralling.
AL: The problem is that the kind of music most people like [from a 'party band'] gets boring to musicians, and the kind musicians like gets boring to most people. So we had to find an equilibrium.

TC: What does the band's name mean?
MV: My idea was to give it a different meaning every show - but maybe that should be off the record. Yuzimi is a patwa [Jamaican slang] word. It means "y'dig it?"

TC: Liebstock was your first performance. Talk about that.
Dan Neslusan: It was a great performance. It was great to be up on the stage with the PAs and the whole sound system and everything. We were really happy with how many people came out to see the show.
AK: We might have been ready to play well before the gig, but it was nice to know that we were all prepared and musically on the same page. If you start out just excited about having a band [without real practice], you end up having to win people back as you get better, which is hard to do - especially at Middlebury. But if you start out with a tight gig and people having fun, you hit the ground running.

TC: You said starting out as a band is especially difficult here. Why?
AK: It's hard on this campus to get people psyched about live music. I think there are three reasons. First, there's a limited amount of bands on campus, and people probably won't want to hear the same three bands all the time, so they might be less enthusiastic about live music in general. Also, the social scene isn't the most conducive to live music. Musical tastes on campus are very different, and so most people just get a DJ. But live music is more fun. Always.
AK: The third thing is - and you guys can disagree with me on this - there aren't enough good venues in this school or in this town. Like this Grille place right in front of us. It's nice, but it's not very conducive to live music, or hosting a party.
AK: And [the limited live music scene] is frustrating, because there are tons of talented kids here. We just need a better network.
MV: We're trying to change that. The more people who come out to support live music, the better. It's just more fun.

TC: Do you have a method for choosing which songs to play?
MV: Yes. Always songs we like to play.
AL: That's number one.
MV: And that we think will be well-received: what do people want to dance to?
AK: We tend to do songs that are either funky, beautiful - ones everyone knows - or just crazy dance-a-thons. The way we pick songs is very democratic. Each of us has contributed a song.
AL: Usually [in a band], there's just one leader, but this is an extremely democratic band - the most democratic I've ever played in.

TC: This might sound a little cheesy, but what does the future of Yuzimi look like?`
AL: At this point we're not thinking too much about the future. We've only been playing together for what, a month? We were wise enough to keep our heads in the present. We're still in the beginning stages where we're learning each other's strengths and weaknesses.
MV: We do all have the advantage of having played in bands before. We're having a blast.